Share this:

What leader is best suited to handle this crisis? Zombies marching in a San Diego rally for presidential candidate A. Zombie. Photo: Reuters

What leader is best suited to handle this crisis? Zombies marching in a San Diego rally for presidential candidate A. Zombie. (Reuters)

One question — a question of surpassing, even existential importance — was the subject of not a single debate question or policy paper: Which candidate would be better equipped to save civilization in the face of a global zombie uprising?

The mother of all 3 a.m. phone calls would begin like this: “Mr. President, very sorry to wake you, but it seems that a devastating pathogen has reanimated the dead and turned them into cannibals, and now they’re feasting on the living, especially in the swing states of Ohio and Virginia. Would you like me to assemble those members of the Cabinet who aren’t eating their deputies?”

A zombie invasion, although a low-probability event (only for the technical reason that zombies don’t exist) represents, in the words of Daniel Drezner, the author of “Theories of International Politics and Zombies” and a Tufts University professor, “the perfect, protean 21st century threat — it’s terrorism and biowarfare and pandemic rolled into one.”

Drezner argues that zombies are a prism through which we can understand how governments react to supreme emergencies — of obvious relevance in an era when disaster seems to be visiting us with great frequency.

Zombies never seem to exhaust themselves as a subject of horror movies and fright literature. From time to time, popular interest wanes, but then along comes an attack like that of 9/11 or a dire recession or a Hurricane Sandy, and people begin to contemplate the fragility of civilization and the limitations of government — just ask the people of Long Island and the Jersey Shore.

As Drezner says, zombie movies and comics and TV shows aren’t actually about zombies: “What they’re about is how humans react to the threat of zombies.”

One problem a president would face, Drezner says, is that the zombie crisis might begin ambiguously: “When it emerges, it will be very, very hard to define exactly what the threat is.”

Presumably, it would begin with some sort of terrible pathogen (the sort that has turned most of humanity into zombies on one of cable television’s most popular shows, “The Walking Dead”), but the devastation wouldn’t be immediate. The 3 a.m. phone call might begin more like this: “Something bad is happening, Mr. President, but we’re not sure what.”

Within days, though, it would become clear that in order to save what remains of humanity, a president would have to take the most dire and seemingly cruel steps imaginable, working in an atmosphere of paranoia and pervasive death and bureaucratic miscommunication. “The problem with the undead is that they pose a nightmare for interagency policy coordination,” Drezner says, noting the large number of federal organizations that would be required to fight the zombies.

He also argues that the chance that a zombie pathogen could escape from a government laboratory grows as federal spending increases. “The more biocontainment facilities built by the NIH and the CDC,” he says, “and the more experiments and studies done on dangerous pathogens, the more likely it is that you could have a pathogen leak.”)

I tend to think that during a global zombie uprising, citizens would grow mistrustful very quickly if they thought they were being told lies. Drezner thinks the same thing, and we both arrived at the name of a leader who might have the wherewithal to neutralize the zombie threat: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“He would get out there and say, ‘Don’t be a moron, these are zombies — if they bite you, you’re gonna die,’” Drezner says. “What you need is someone willing to talk straight, someone with steady nerves.”

But could any president overcome the highly politicized recriminations that would begin at the outset of a zombie crisis and only intensify as the situation deteriorated?

It’s safe to assume that, under a Republican president, liberals would blame the zombie crisis on Halliburton and George W. Bush. If a Democrat were in charge, conservatives would blame ObamaCare.

We are living in an age in which the velocity of cataclysm seems to be accelerating. Combine that with political dysfunction and widespread cynicism, and you have a formula for eventual disaster, with or without zombies.